Just over a year after Richard Di Natale’s surprise accession to the Greens leadership, it’s time to lay bare for voters the baloney that greeted his promotion.

Remember how sections of the media told us that the smiling, homely doctor promised a more middle-of-the-road party? Propagating that line last June, The Monthly cooed about the great negotiator, the Aussie blokishness, the robust masculine presence, the devotee of sport, the keen surfer, and how the child of Italian immigrants would lead the Greens towards the political centre.

In fact, 12 months on, the myth of Mr Mainstream has been ­exposed in time for the July 2 ­election.

The cheery-faced doctor is a radical political activist intent on undermining basic freedoms across the economic, social, cultural and political fronts. The only difference between Di Natale and former Greens leaders Bob Brown and Christine Milne is that the current leader is far more savvy and effective.

The great negotiator waved through new voting rules in the Senate that will benefit the Greens the most, not at this year’s double-dissolution election but certainly at the next one. That positions Di Natale to lead a party that is no longer an irrelevant fringe group. The Greens are set to become highly influential political extremists hellbent on imposing radical change across all levels of society.

Under Di Natale, the Greens have continued their long and steady march through our institutions, pushing a so-called Safe Schools program into our classrooms. This is deep Green social engineering. The original program counselled teachers that it is “heterosexist” to refer to students as girls and boys and expected young children to role-play as LGBTI adults. The program is the work of Safe Schools Coalition Victoria co-founder Roz Ward, who resigned from her Victorian government advisory role yesterday. Ward has openly admitted the program is part of a broader Marxist strategy to change society. It has nothing to do with discouraging bullying in schools and everything to do with introducing queer politics into the classrooms of 11-year-old children.

Di Natale’s commitment to sexual role-playing and heterosexist accusations in the classroom adds another stratum to the existing layers of Green propaganda already cemented into our schools. Green-fuelled global warming hysteria hoodwinks students not just in science classes but English and maths too. (And we wonder why literacy and numeracy levels continue to slide.) The Greens’ loopy anti-free-market ideology features too, with Year 8 geography students presented with materials that tell them: “Globalisation is what happens when you lose your job in Brunswick, Bankstown or Elizabeth because the company for which you work has been bought out by the Australian subsidiary of a Dallas-based transnational company that has decided to relocate its production of T-shirts to Mexico because of cheaper wage costs and lower health and safety standards.”

Far from Di Natale taking the Greens more mainstream this election, the Greens are selling more feel-good policies that will do harm. On Thursday, Greens senator Rachel Siewert announced a $20 million policy to reduce the number of Aboriginal children entering out-of-home care. The Greens appear oblivious to the fact children, whatever their skin colour, are not removed from families when mum forgets to pack morning tea. Children, ­regardless of skin colour, are removed from dysfunctional families riddled with neglect, violence and drug addiction. The Greens’ rights-based agenda, blind also to any notion of parental responsibility, would rather see children ­remain in these dire conditions.

Under Di Natale, the Greens are also advancing on our most basic freedoms in this election. With a commitment to removing the religious exemptions in section 37 of the Sex Discrimination Act, they are intent on destroying the fundamental value of freedom of religion that has underpinned our free and liberal democracy.

These longstanding legal exemptions provide for freedom of religion and the rights of religious groups to employ people who subscribe to their beliefs and live by those values.

With Di Natale at the helm, freedom of religion counts for little and the only acceptable religion is called the Australian Greens. Their Ten Commandments include: Thou shalt not allow the market to be free (even if free markets have lifted billions of people out of poverty); thou shalt not utter the four-letter profanity “coal” (even if coal can lift billions more out of poverty); thou shalt not control the nation’s borders (even if it stops thousands of people drowning at sea); thou shalt not speak freely if it hurts someone’s feelings (even though the Enlightenment value of freedom of speech has been the critical driver of progress in the West); and churches shalt not employ only people with their values (even if that’s exactly what the Greens do).

As Anthony Fisher, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, wrote in these pages last week: “If a member of the Greens were a climate change sceptic I expect they’d be expelled; if one of the party’s candidates turned out to be anti-abortion and pro-traditional marriage, they’d probably lose preselection. That’s because the Greens are entitled to select people who represent their values. So should others be.”

Except the Greens are not a religion and therefore religious exemptions do not apply to them. Like the right to freedom of speech, the right to freedom of religion is one of our most fundamental rights. Liberal democracies were not built off the back of feel-good Green ideology. Liberal democracies emerged over hundreds of years from the tireless efforts of genuinely liberal-minded thinkers who understood that real liberty depends on basic rights such as freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of association, property rights and the rule of law.

Hypocritically for a party that talks so much about tolerance, pick just about any issue and the Greens vent extraordinary intolerance. Remember how Greens senator Larissa Waters greeted news that the then minister assisting the prime minister for women, Michaelia Cash, refused to call herself a feminist? “The horror,” screeched Waters because a woman chose not to wear the feminist label.

Nothing has changed under Di Natale. There is no feminist horror directed at real feminist issues, such as the enslavement of young girls by Islamic State. And if you don’t agree with same-sex marriage, the Greens will label you a bigot and a homophobe. If you want to discuss how Islam is used by Islamic terrorists, you will be derided as an Islamophobe.

Ignoring hundreds of years of history, the Greens, under their leader, are intent on destroying our most fundamental rights in the name of identity politics and faddish rights based on hurt feelings.

It’s no coincidence that Martine Delaney, a Greens candidate for the federal seat of Franklin, complained to the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Commissioner that pamphlets produced by Catholic Archbishop of Hobart Julian Porteous defending the traditional definition of marriage were offensive and in breach of Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Act.

Weighing up hurt feelings over the fundamental right to speak freely, the Greens choose the former. And under Di Natale, the great Green con about our most basic freedoms will continue all the way to the election and beyond. Mr Mainstream? That’s the biggest myth.